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How reliable is restoring from Time Machine backup

bigjnyc

bigjnyc

Suspended
Original poster
Apr 10, 2008
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hey guys,

I just had to drop off my gf's MBA at the apple store. They are going to be replacing the logic board and repartioning/cleaning out the SSD. I have been doing time machine backups for her since she got the machine. My question is how reliable is restoring from time machine? I am mostly concerned about her pictures, applications, movies and documents. I always use migration assistant with an ethernet cable connected from a previous computer to a new one but have never restored from time machine.... I'm a little worried now and hope I didnt screw up by leaving the computer with apple.
 
I've never had a problem restoring from Time Machine. That's what I usually do when I swap drives or get new computers.
 
I had a flaky drive for a couple years and had to reinitialise and restore from my time machine back up about every 3 months. It worked flawlessly each time.
 
I've restored from TM several times, swapping drives, works well. Just be patient while it transfers everything, have something else to do, a watched pot never boils.
 
In general very reliable however bugs can happen, there was one a year or so back which made a full restore not possible even though individual user files could be which is why it's always a good idea to have multiple types of backup.

I have one TM, one CCC made every so often, and nightly incremental backups to a cloud backup service.
 
I use two different types of backups, not because I don't trust one, but they serve slightly different purposes.

I have TM for document/file/folder retrieval. Those times when I delete or mess up a folder. I have used TM for a full system restore and it worked as advertised, albeit slowly.

I also use CarbonCopy Cloner, it's great and fast and full system restores, which is why I also use this.

The third reason, I like to have two different backups incase of hardware failure of my backup device.

In the end Time Machine was and continues to be very reliable and the data is there when I need it :)
 
i have had issues restoring from a TM in the past... but that is because of the way i did the backups. So now after i restore a machine from TM i start a new fresh backup for it. That being said however, and i have done this a lot lately especially (Active Dir bind issues locking me out of one of my user account) TM restores, (over a gigabit switch for a 30gig drive less than an hour to restore.. so i am quite happy with speed (though i realize my situation is somewhat unconventional as all other user files music pics etc are stored on server) and also quite happy with outcome of resort.... no issues at all :D

If i were you i wouldn't worry about restoring, and have fun with it :D
 
Thanks for all the replies. The restore went flawlessly. It took a few hours because I did it over wi-fi... I couldnt find a USB cable in my house anywhere, funny I use to have tons of those lying around before. Anyways everything got restored perfectly so it was a success :D
 
bigjnyc said:
Thanks for all the replies. The restore went flawlessly. It took a few hours because I did it over wi-fi... I couldnt find a USB cable in my house anywhere, funny I use to have tons of those lying around before. Anyways everything got restored perfectly so it was a success :D
Click to expand...

Wow it actually worked over WiFi eh? Good deal. It's really not recommended to do it that way and I have a friend who tried to do that and she left if for a whole day and it never finished. She canceled it and brought it into Apple to have them do it. She didn't have any cables of any kind.
 
SandboxGeneral said:
Wow it actually worked over WiFi eh? Good deal. It's really not recommended to do it that way and I have a friend who tried to do that and she left if for a whole day and it never finished. She canceled it and brought it into Apple to have them do it. She didn't have any cables of any kind.
Click to expand...

Wow I guess I got lucky then. I'll make sure to have a USB cable handy if I have to do this again
 
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